On a day in late 2024, Avery Klemmer found herself on yet another transatlantic flight with her colleagues at the VC firm Thrive Capital. The team was flying to London to woo the secretive startup Isomorphic Labs — a mission that many other investors thought futile.
Isomorphic Labs is an offshoot of Alphabet’s artificial intelligence research laboratory, and to that point, it had kept outside investors at bay. Isomorphic wasn’t even actively raising money. The Thrive Capital team hoped to persuade the startup otherwise, so that it could get a stake in the young company.
“A lot of people kind of figured this was uninvestable because it was a Google company. … But, when someone says something’s impossible. I think we see a challenge,” Klemmer said.
Isomorphic was built around a single piece of technology, a protein modeling tool called AlphaFold. A modeling tool may sound simple, but it stunned scientists and, during Thrive Capital’s 18-month-long courtship, had been the basis for a Nobel Prize in chemistry. Isomorphic wanted to turn the technology into an engine for new medicines — an “intensely exciting prize” that Klemmer said could be both economically valuable and tangible evidence that AI was more than just hype.
The question now is whether — and how — Isomorphic will deliver on its promise.